Posts by BlueR@nger

El Reg Street View snappers caught on camera

They get around

Saw a google-mobile in Blyth Northumberland today around the port area. Wish I'd had my phone on me at the time to take a snap :(

Is it safe to download al Qaeda manuals yet?

But look on the bright side...

If you do download the manual and get put in prison, at least you come out of it with a CCNA at the end of it

UK prisoners offered data cabling training

Get locked up..... get qualified

WTF!!!!! I've recently been looking at training in order to increase my marketability and can only get a 40% grant from business link. the rest I have to stump up myself.

However, if I want to get it for free looks like I'll have to do a spot of armed robbery and get put away for a few years with an almost guarunteed job at the end of it!?!?!?!?! That's just taking the p*ss especially in this current echonomic climate where IT workers are competing fang and tooth for whatever's out there atm.

What is going on in this country? I'd ask if Screaming Lord such was in charge, but I'm damn sure he'd do a better job than the current clowns in charge.

Paris due to the complete no brainer

Oz mobe vid flasher caught red-handed

someone's got to

Guy sounds like a bit of a w@nker to me.

DARPA awards 'Deep Green' battle-computer cash

Robo planes and onwards.....

I take it all back!!! I swear I just saw that naked austrian walking down the street there.

Looks like we're all doomed to end up as biological batteries or a brief crunchy splat on the ground.

Skynet + Deep Green + fleets of robo planes + American Airforce zombie anit network.

Yep! We're gonna be in trouble. Better start building them bunkers now boys n girls. Judgement day is nigh!!!!!

The white wrap around one with leather straps on the cuffs please.

Blighty joins killer robot club with Afghan strike

Dum dum dumdeedum

hmmm. all of a sudden all the hype back in the 80s to develop LISP and the corresponding AI to go with it doesn't sound so appealing.

I guess we're allright until we start seeing naked austrian's dropping out of the sky with a penchant for bikes, boots and motorcycles.

Mines the bullet proof one with extra 5 Terrawatt EMP shielding.

Microsoft seeds HP PCs with Live Search

Pure waste of time

It's the bain of my life that whenever we get a new laptop from Dell, one of the first things we have to do is remove google toolbar and google desktop which comes preinstalled. This adds an extra 5 minutes to each build we do.

And now we have to do the same with any HP kit we get.

Why can't vendors get the hint. We don't want anything else installed unless we provide you with an OEM image!!!! There's just more for us to remove before we can send the kit out!!!

Temp workers to get equal rights after 12 weeks

@Steve on High Hourly rates

on the other side, I've never had a temp job where my hourly rate was anywhere as low as a salaried person. I tend to find that my hourly rate is 2-3 times more than my fully employed colleagues.

I think you'll find that most agencies charge 25-30% of the net client rate. It's all very well to say ditch the agencies, but without them it just makes it much harder to find contracts.

As a contractor, agencies are my life blood. They do my marketing, keep me informed on potential clients, handle pretty much all of the legal stuff that I would cost me a fortune in time and money to sort out any other way.

This 12 week rule is as welcome as a whole in the head to me. I choose to be different. I choose not to have the same rights as a normal employee.

Let's hope that this one also has an opt out option as I sure as hell WILL be ticking it.

Intel said to feed Google solid state drives

@Ashley

"Imagine a computer that you never have to turn off, because it uses almost no power (and never freezes up, requiring a reboot!), and you can hot-swap the drives"

Then imagine the frustration and extra man hours of work ceated when the 1st line support person gets the punter to reboot the computer just for it to load up the same state again and again and again.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHGGGGGGGGGG!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I think we'll keep RAM and storage as completely different entities thank you very much :)

Windows XP SP3 blame game begins

@Kenny and own findings

I think he meant downgrade to vista. I can't see any "up" side to a remake of the windows ME fiasco which Vista is turning out to be.

To all else, I downloaded the 500 meg ISO image and have isntalled it on both intel and AMD chipsets with no problems. The 2 AMDs I've tested on were a XP2800 Athalon and XP3200 Barton.

No spontaneous reboots or instabillaty detected as of yet.

Improved system performance and memory usage is down though which can't be a bad thing.

If you install the SP manually then I don't think you will have many problems. It seems to be the automatic update which is causing most of the problems.

Windows XP SP3 leaps into the tubes

Such a shame :(

For the past couple of days I've been having a fiddle with SP3 with the following results.

On an old P4 Vaio laptop, with SP2 usual running memory was at 350MB after bootup. With SP3 this has gone down to 210. Definately sped up the OS loading and general applications (office, dreamweaver, IE, firefox) are also noticeably faster. Non of the usual post SP instability (but this is still on day 3)

Main computer is AMD XP3200 barton. Before SP memory usage on bootup was at 410 MB, gone down to 290 MB and boots up a heck of a lot faster than before. Applications also run faster, especially when swapping between apps.

Dell Latitude D630 - SP2 memory on bootup was 310 MB, gone down to 210, Again faster on the reboot and applications once loaded work as the other 2.

one thing to note, if you have Spybot seek and destroy installed, disable it before SP update or you'll be sitting for 10 minutes clicking on the allow registry key update before boot then another 10 minutes while it deletes said keys.

Concensus - SP3 definatley speeds things up and reduces memory usage. Still early days so can't comment on stability, but haven't had a crash, bluescreen or slowdown as of yet (that's after 2 days of intensive flash, dreamweaver and photoshop usage). Firefox memory gobbling also seems to have slowed down. After a day of usage, I've seen FF snaffle up to 600 megs of system RAM and more depending on the sites I'm working on. Yesterday it went from usual 40 meg to just over 100 on intensive usage.

IMHO they've got it spot on this time round. And I don't say that lightly. Drives me mad that they wait until after they withdraw a product to get it almost perfected. M$ if you're listening, withdraw Vimto and reinstate XP. There's no competition. The Wow was already there.

Microsoft profits fall in Q1

Downgrade?!?

From my experience anything that makes a computer run faster, improves stability and compatability with other hardware and applications is an Upgrade.

You'd think that M$ would have learned after the windows millenium fiasco.